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Jonathan Bluestein is a martial artist and author who contacted Guy with some interesting questions related to his research. Jonathan is looking into the similarities and differences between the traditional Chinese martial arts and traditional European Martial Arts, both in Medieval and Renaissance times as well as in our everyday lives today.
Jonathan’s background is in traditional oriental martial arts in general and he practices and teaches traditional Chinese martial arts from his school in Israel. He is the author of a number of books on the martial arts as well as other topics. He’s also a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine.
Jonathan is currently in the midst of working on a book called Martial Arts Politics Explained. In this episode we discuss how we might classify different types of martial arts school, and how the structures and hierarchies of different types of schools inform the politics within the school. Jonathan explains how Chinese martial arts schools work and the culture of family and disciples within them. We discuss how the cultures within Western historical martial arts schools compare.
This is a wide ranging conversation which also covers philosophy, the war in Israel, straight swords versus curved swords, and Chinese medicine.
You may find this list of terminology useful, which was helpfully provided by Jonathan:
Names of Jonathan’s teachers:
Master Nitzan Oren
Grand-Master Zhou Jingxuan
Master Sapir Tal
Master Stephen Jackowicz
Master Brian Hall
Martial arts Jonathan has studied and have taught:
Xing Yi Quan
Pigua Zhang
Jook Lum Southern Mantis
Bagua Zhang
Li Jia Shaolin Quan (Li Family Shaolin)
Weapons mentioned:
Dao (Chinese curved sword)
Miao Dao (Chinese equivalent of the Nodachi/Odachi)
Historical figures and periods:
General Qi Jiguang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_Jiguang
Japanese Pirates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wokou
Meiji Restoration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration
Chinese Cultural terms:
Wuguan - 'Martial Hall' - Chinese equivalent term to 'Dojo'.
Kwan - the Cantonese pronunciation of 'Guan', and short for 'Wuguan'.
Gongfu - A high level of skill, acquired through longstanding effort and practice
Gongfu Family (Gongfu Jia) - the martial arts family within a given lineage, of teachers and disciples
Shifu - a teacher in a traditional relationship of a Master and an apprentice
Tudi - a disciple of a Shifu - the Apprentice
Bai Shi - the ceremony with which a Tudi is accepted into the Gongfu Family.
Transcript
Guy Windsor
I'm here today with Jonathan Bluestein, who is a martial artist and author who has some interesting questions for me about various things and contacted me about a research project of his. So, Jonathan, why don't we start by you telling us who you are, what you're interested in and why you needed to pick my brains?
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes, thank you very much for having me today, Guy. And this conversation is certainly long overdue. We are looking to discuss certain similarities and differences between the traditional Chinese martial arts the field of practice and study from which I come from, and traditional European Martial Arts both in I suppose, Medieval and Renaissance times as well as in our everyday lives today. My background is in traditional oriental martial arts in general. I did begin with Western boxing, but I quickly transitioned into Okinawan karate and eventually ended up practicing and teaching the traditional Chinese martial arts. I've had five teachers. Just briefly, my main teachers are Shifu Nitzan Oren, my late Qigong teacher’s teacher, Master Zhou Jingxuan from Tianjin. Shifu Sapir Tal, Shifu Stephen Jackowicz and Shifu Brian Hall. In our tradition, mentioning one’s teachers is an important cultural facet, and respect for one’s teachers as an integral part of the tradition itself is something maybe we can discuss later. And the martial arts I studied primarily Chinese martial arts. Xing Yi Quan, Pigua Zhang, Jook Lum Southern Mantis, a little bit of Bagua Zhang, and the Li Family tradition of Shaolin. I've been teaching for about a decade, I've been practicing martial arts for about 18 years. And, as Guy mentioned, I'm the author of a number of books on the martial arts as well as other topics. And I'm a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine.
Guy Windsor
Okay, pretty comprehensive. Now, I think maybe the first thing that will leap out to us is that in historical martial arts as we know them, it is deplorably unlikely that any given person will actually mention their teachers. As a teacher, I've often found that to be a little bit annoying, like, for God's sake, tell us where you got your stuff from. But it basically comes down to the historical martial arts as we are doing them, when we use the term historical martial arts, we're basically referring to martial arts have been recreated from textual sources from bygone periods, which means there is no living tradition at all. So, for example, if we're doing early 15th century knightly combat, we're doing it from books written in the early 15th century. And there is no lineage to draw on. Now, that said, there is a sort of a development of European swordsmanship, from very long ago, and we can trace a development from the 16th century swordplay into the use of the Rapier into the use of the smallsword or from the smallsword into what became known as classical fencing, from classical fencing into modern sport fencing. So the closest thing we really have is some of the lineages of classical fencing that date back to the 19th century. And you could say that the inheritors of the European Martial Arts, certainly the sword arts would be the sport fencers, who are not doing a martial art at all. Let me be the first to say this is a competitive sport. This is not supposed to be how you win a sword fight in real life. So there is a fundamental difference in where we're coming from. So, you know, I'm mostly known for my research into specific historical masters. And yeah, some of my students have students who have students, so I guess if this was a Chinese tradition will be some sort of, I don't know, Shi-pa or something like that.
Jonathan Bluestein
Si-gung. Si-gung is the teacher of the Shifu.
Guy Windsor
Okay. But there's another generation past that as well.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes. There are additional ones.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, exactly. So I'll be one of them. But there's no expectation of the student preserving the Master’s tradition. The student in our activity, is their job is to basically do more research, find out new things and in many cases, prove their teacher wrong. It is much closer to, for example, science in terms of the way lineage works. Like if you trained under Richard Fineman in physics, that's super cool. And it kind of means something. But you're only going to get a Nobel Prize by doing something that Fineman couldn't.
Jonathan Bluestein
Certainly, and a tad adversarial in the transmission between generations.
Guy Windsor
I wouldn't call it adversarial. I'd call it more developmental. I mean, it's like, like having kids, right? I can hear that you have children, I have children as well. At the moment, I know more than my children on practically every topic, not every topic because now my eldest is now doing some chemistry and biology at school that I don't know. So she's passed me in the chemistry department already. But there will be a time when, my youngest wants to become a doctor. Fairly quickly, when she goes to med school, if she goes to med school, she's 14. So there's a way to go. Fairly quickly, as she gets to med school, she's going to know a lot more about medicine than I do. And that's good. That's what parents want. We want our children to surpass us in whatever areas they're interested in. And so that's closer to how I feel about my students. When one of my students brings out a book, or produces some research or teaches a seminar, whatever, and is doing their own thing using the training I've given them and building on it rather than repeating it. That's a good thing because it develops the art, it makes the art broader and deeper.
Jonathan Bluestein
Okay, so I would like to touch on several differences and similarities that you just mentioned. One is that we have two types of lineages in the traditional Chinese martial arts, the typical one is indeed a transmission from teacher to student, which may have been going on for 1000s of years, the case being that this is not typically documented past a few generations, because of what had happened.
Guy Windsor
So if you claim a lineage going back 1000s of years, surely you have to be able to document that to claim it?
Jonathan Bluestein
And that's exactly one of the problems here because no extant lineage of a traditional Chinese martial art can prove that it has been practiced for 1000s of years. The evidence is anecdotal, either by stories, or by the fact that we do have paintings and technique descriptions in books, not necessarily manuals even, that indicate that very similar things were already there, say 1000 or 2000 years ago. We know that it's been around because it's been a consistent transmission. But they can't prove it, the farthest that I know that a Chinese martial art can prove and trace its roots would be around 400 to 500 years ago. And that is quite rare.
Guy Windsor
That's comparable to what we can trace, not lineages exactly, but these people were trained with those people who trained with those people going back to about 1380, something like that. That's about as far back, but the art that we're talking about has changed radically in the intervening hundreds of years. There’s no sense of the arts themselves being maintained down the generations, they've always been changed, because European Martial Arts generally are very technologically driven. So armour changed radically in the late 14th century and so the martial arts changed to accommodate them. Then gunpowder became massively important from the middle of the 15th century onwards. So the martial arts changed to accommodate them. And so it goes.
Jonathan Bluestein
I would say the majority of traditional Chinese martial arts can only say they go back around 150, 250 years. So we would actually refer to them as rather young styles, they haven't been around for very long. As a matter of fact, most of the popular styles in the world today, the majority of them being, you know, Japanese martial arts and their derivatives have not been around for more than a century in their modern forms.
Guy Windsor
Right. Judo, Aikido etcetera.
Jonathan Bluestein
So the majority of Chinese styles have documented lineages. They go back a few generations, typically anywhere between three and 10 generations and then prior to that, it's mostly myth and storytelling and anecdote. But there are also a handful of styles nowadays, which have been recreated from manuals. That is a very new thing has been going on for the past 20 years, the Chinese in parallel with the Europeans have been doing something very similar. And the reason for this is attempting to bring about extinct traditions that were once quite noteworthy and historically important. So military spear traditions and sword traditions. And for example, there's a very famous Chinese general by the name of Qi Jiguang, who fought both in Korea, what is now in the area of Korea, as well as on the coastal plains of China against the Japanese pirates. So there's actually a period with massive Japanese pirate excursions against the coastal settlements of China. And that was a big thing that Chinese/Japanese feud is much older than the Second World War. And during that time, Qi Jiguang is the general was said to have fended off the pirates, and that is documented in official imperial history books. And one of the weapons utilised by the troops of Qi Jiguang is the Miao Dao. Miao Dao is a longsword comparable with what is today the Japanese Nodachi/Odachi. So it is a Katana-like weapon, somewhat different in the construction of the handle. Because the Chinese did not have the same type of wrap around the handles as the Japanese do, they preferred using plain wooden handles. So the grain of the wood would be what your palm would rub against and then keep the sword in hand, rather than this very rough grip that the Japanese are using. And the sword was around the length of 135 centimetres, which is quite long.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it's about the same as a European longsword. Generally, I mean, they vary hugely in length, but yeah. My favourite longsword is about 140.
Jonathan Bluestein
Okay. So of course that will depend on one's height. For my height, I'm 168 centimetres, five foot six. So for me an optimal Miao Dao is around 135 centimetres. If I was a tad taller then 140 is better. And they were up to two meters long. Yes, yes, there are historical examples, both in written documentation, as well as in paintings.
Guy Windsor
We have swords like that called Montante and Spadone. Really big, sort of five foot long sort of thing.
Jonathan Bluestein
The difference being I think, the montante and the longswords, were around for a very long time. While the Miao Dao actually was properly utilized for a very brief period in Chinese history, it then sort of disappeared. It was kept in a very small scarce traditions within the Chinese martial arts. But because those lineages were so few, and in between, very few people in China preserved the type of practice. A lot of people who were not privy to learn from these particular lineages recreated a lot of Miao Dao practice and content from the traditional manuals, which were actually quite detailed, they were at least as detailed as the good manuals you have from the medieval period.
Guy Windsor
So that's something I'm curious about, these historical sources. It is quite difficult to find historical sources that have sufficient information in one source that you can actually recreate the system from that, because usually they're not written to enable that, they're written as a record for someone who already knows it, or is exactly a way of a fencing master getting more business rather than for posterity to preserve the entirety of the art in a way such that it can be recreated. So, tell us about your research project. You initially contacted me through a mutual friend, what is your actual research project?
Jonathan Bluestein
We're currently in the midst of working on a book called Martial Arts Politics Explained.
Guy Windsor
That is a bold title.
Jonathan Bluestein
Oh, it is. Martial Arts Politics Explained. I think the subtitle is Cultural History in Common, because where we have martial arts politics, there's going to be a lot of drama and there's going to be a lot of comedy as well.
Guy Windsor
That is true in every area of martial arts I've ever encountered.
Jonathan Bluestein
So, when one seeks to explain how politics work in the martial arts, where I started the book is with exploring the different types of martial arts schools. So all over the world, we have certain modalities which are quite common. We have the Sports Club, which can be subdivided into two categories. Generally speaking, you have the stable and you have the gym. A stable is simply a martial arts sports club that's more geared towards competition. So competitors make up the majority of people there. And the gym is a laypeople sports club, there might be a few competitors, but most people are not professional athletes.
Guy Windsor
That's a really useful distinction. We see that in historical martial arts clubs. Those that are basically sports clubs are either stables or gyms, you are right, I had not thought of it that way.
Jonathan Bluestein
It took me a while to get to it. I began writing the book and it dawned on me. And the word stable, I actually borrowed from the sumo stables of Japan. So this is the Japanese term, because they figured those sumo warriors were essentially groomed, similar to how they would groom professional horses.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And modern Formula One companies are often referred to as stables.
Jonathan Bluestein
Oh, that's very interesting. And the Formula One drivers, for people who are not in the know, are actually top athletes, and they do a whole lot more than simply drive those cars. One of the things I know they do, they do mid-range competitive running, they don't actually compete, but they run at a competitive level in order to build the stamina and the body strength required for the races.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so you've got the sports clubs, which are stables or gyms. What are the others?
Jonathan Bluestein
The other ones would be the traditional Dojo or Dojang. Dojo is the Japanese tradition, the Dojang is the equivalent Korean tradition, which is quite close to it. You've got the Wuguan. Wuguan is the Mandarin term for the martial hall, literally, martial hall. In the West, there are a lot of Cantonese speaking Chinese. So a lot of people in the United Kingdom, for example, as well as in the United States know the Wuguan as the Kwan. Kwan is a hall, short for the Wuguan which is the martial hall. So when they say the word, “hall”, one has to think, oh, they actually referring to something that's kind of like a YMCA. It's a community centre. So historically, unlike the dojo. In Japan, the Dojo is built, sort of like a temple. So it's a culturally isolated sort of unit where people go to do this sacred thing. The Wuguan one, in terms of how things are handled within it can be a tad less formal, because it can be a community centre where people don't just practice martial arts, they also have social gatherings, they also do something for the kids. It's not a YMCA in the commercial sense, but it's a YMCA in the communal sense. Originally, traditionally. Then you have of course, the cult.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Right. We have some of those in historical martial arts too. And honestly, one of the things I had to work pretty hard at in the beginning, was not allowing my new young school to develop into a cult, there were definitely people who came in the early days, who wanted it to become a cult.
Jonathan Bluestein
People seeking spiritual meaning, right, we have a lack of spiritual meaning.
Guy Windsor
But also looking for a somebody to tell them what to do. A spiritual leader who would basically make all the decisions for them, and they wouldn't have to think about the big scary stuff outside the training hall ever again. It's a difficult thing, because on the one hand, you have students who want you to provide a service for them that on the face of it is kind of fine. But it leads in a direction where you end up becoming the unquestionable authority and that is death to academic research. The worst thing that can happen to the scientist is when people just take his word for stuff and don't actually read their papers and figure out whether they're actually right or not.
Jonathan Bluestein
That's a problem we have in all of martial arts, there are certain people who are into actually building a comprehensive understanding of the tradition. And other ones that join along for other reasons. We have the sports club, which can be a gym or a stable we have the dojo or dojang. We have the Wuguan, we have the cult, everybody knows what how cults are, but there are specifics to martial arts cults we can discuss later. We have the temple, and the temple is its own type, but it's almost a subtype, it can be a subtype of any of the other ones. It's a school that handles itself as an isolated cultural sphere, from the rest of society. So it can be an actual physical temple, or at times, it's in Japanese martial arts, for example, that would be a Hombu Dojo, where it's the headquarters of the organisation. But people ascend to the headquarters, one could say emigrate there for a period of a few weeks, a few months, a few years, in order to practice in isolation. And the temple has its own dynamics, because then you have a temple bureaucracy. In temples there is generally speaking, almost always a guiding ideology, if not a religion. And you have to either have faith in that religion, or at least pay lip service to it. And it's not always called a religion. Sometimes it is. For example, you might be familiar with the one of the newer Japanese styles that was founded a few decades ago, called Shorinji. Kempo., so Shorinji Kempo, literally, by the way, in Chinese that will be Shaolin Quan Fa. Shorinji is Shaolin. And Kempo is fist method, in Chinese: Quan Fa. So they literally call the style Shaolin Fist Method, although it is quite curiously partly a recreated style, or it's a manually inspired, inspired from manuals and paintings, and the founder’s own ideas. The founder was Doshin So. In any case, this is a religious organisation. Okay, so going to practice that their Hombu Dojo is, in a way you join in the religion, but it's not exactly like in western religions, because the East Asian peoples have a different conception of what religion is, therefore, most East Asian people unless they're either Christians or Muslims, even some of the Muslims, I suppose. A religion is something, I wouldn't want to put down any religion, but it's almost like a clothing item is something you choose to wear. It's what you show, it's what you express. So you can wear several clothing items on top of each other, which one did you wear first and which one was on top of it, you can change that. And religions have different functions. Much like with attire, some are for summer, some are for winter. So some religions they use for their weddings, others for the funerals, others see it for their everyday lives. So they're more flexible in their conception of what it means to be religious and what the religion can be used for. It's not a monotheistic commitment, even a lot of them who believe in a monotheistic religion would take on another religion, or maybe two of them, to be practiced or believed in, in a different area of their lives. And it's considered perfectly legitimate in Japan and China and in in Korea.
Guy Windsor
So we're talking about a religion, which is not a requirement to believe a specific theology.
Jonathan Bluestein
It could be, it could be. It's very popular in certain areas of East Asia that, for example, you would just have to say yes, I do believe that the founder was divinely inspired. But there is no agenda like, oh, he was divinely inspired, now we have to conquer this or that country.
Guy Windsor
Or he was divinely inspired. Now we have to do everything he says forever.
Jonathan Bluestein
Well, he's dead. So you don’t give him money you give money to his organisation. But this was all just to say that people go and they might, for much a simpler example people go to the Shaolin temple. The Shaolin Temple on some mountain. By the way, the Shaolin was a franchise of temples, both north and south in China. So there is one point in time when there are dozens of them. And they all belong in the Shaolin sect. Shaolin is the name of a Buddhist sect, the name itself means the young forest or the lesser forest or grove, but it simply refers to most of these temples were in the areas of forest or groves. But the idea is you go to a Shaolin temple today, and there are certain Buddhist rituals. And you might bow to the statue of the Buddha. Or you might say a Buddhist prayer in the morning, but do they care whether you might be a Jew or Muslim or Christian? They don't really mind as long as you do whatever they do at the temple, so in their view, there is no contradiction. And a lot of people go there and they feel, like okay, so whilst I'm in the temple, I behave like Buddhist and then at home, I'm a Confucian. For them, that's legitimate. This is different conception of religion in the east. In any case, so we mentioned there is sports club, there is the dodge or dojang. There's the Wuguan known as Kwan in Cantonese, there is the cult, there is the temple. And then the final one, the sixth one, is the recreational, which is likely the most common type of martial art school. In the recreational there is an instructor and there are trainees. Now, I know that in the martial arts people, some people call themselves Shifu, some people call themselves a coach. Some people call themselves an instructor. But I would say, in case of the recreational it really is an instructor, the sole purpose of that person being there is to instruct to just technically show how things work. They're not teacher per se, most of them. They're not a father figure, they're not a leader, they're just there to instruct people on how to benefit themselves in some way, to have fun. And there's no deeper purpose to it. There's, of course, also famously, the subtype of the recreational we all know as the McDojo.
Guy Windsor
The McDojo very often presents itself as a as a cult or gym, or even a stable.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes, exactly. So the McDojo, in a sense, if we were to be honest about it is usually a recreational because it only rises up to the level of being a recreational school. But there are certainly different types of McDojos, that can in a way have legit aspects of their curriculum, and then the McDojo-ish type of attitude with other aspects. I can provide an example. So of all of these six, I mentioned, there could be combinations thereof. So one example I want to give now was of a dojo cult, a dojo cult is a very common one. So there was a school I knew, which was actually a fine school with an excellent curriculum. But then there are a lot of cultish elements in terms of you know, people would tell stories, oh, the teacher killed a cow with a punch. And then there'd be a lot of stories like that. Silly things that people will make up to glorify the teacher, who by the way, he mostly did not encourage this, but he also did not go against it. It was one point in time when suddenly all the male students at the school went and did a mohawk. So that's always a suspicious sign.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that is straight out of Cobra Kai.
Jonathan Bluestein
Exactly. I don't want to tarnish those good people's naming names and reputations. Some of them are really good people, but certainly there are a lot of Cobra Kai-esque elements to that chain of dojos, actually, for a certain period of time, but then again, the contents, the curriculum was actually quite good. So there could be a balance between a very traditional Dojo also affiliated with a very respectable organization in Okinawa. So, things are not black and white. There are many, many shades of grey in the martial arts. Likewise, with the McDojo, you can have a McDojo that's quite malevolent, where the teacher is all about money. And the whole purpose of the McDojo is to enrich the owners. And there could be almost a naive McDojo where it's very low level, but the teacher is just this petty person who doesn't know better.
Guy Windsor
So you've got this classification of different kinds of martial arts schools. How does this relate to the politics?
Jonathan Bluestein
That's a very interesting question. Every type of school structure creates different political dynamics. Let's take the example of dojo. A dojo is built in a very bureaucratic, hierarchical fashion. The whole model of how dojos are operated today arose during the Meiji Restoration period in Japan, when the Japanese were basically saying, we lost a cultural war with the West, we were backwards with our social structure, backwards with our technology, we have to somehow create a new nation, which is Japanese, in essence, at its core, but also abandons a lot of our traditions in favor of Western ideas, which have proven themselves to be more efficient. And we know them to be more efficient, because they're supposedly won over us. The West did not conquer Japan during the 19th century, but the Japanese knew that had the West wanted to, with their ships, and with their armies, they could.
Guy Windsor
And the Japanese were very deliberate about what they incorporated into their culture and what they left out. There's a whole bunch of really interesting books on that exact topic. It wasn't the stuff sort of filtered in it was like, no, we will take this we will not take that.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes. And one of the things they took wholeheartedly was fascism.
Guy Windsor
Unfortunately.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes. For them, it was just an almost a direct continuation of their older feudal system, a more efficient way to do their traditional feudalism. And in fascism, you need hierarchy. And you have commitment to cause and you need structure. And if you go into a traditional Japanese dojo, and this is just descriptive, I don't mean to put them down because there were also many advantages to the things I would be describing now. Social advantages, practical advantages. You see how things are very orderly, even before you step in the place, you bow to the dojo itself, because the place has cultural significance, it has spiritual meaning. Now that in particular comes from Shinto, from the Japanese folk religion, which has it that every object, every thing, every living thing in the universe has a soul has a spiritual dimension to it. So I can bow to an object like the building that is the dojo because I respect it. So you show respect, even before you step in. And you step in and you bow to one another, you bow to the teacher, you bow to your friends. Then the class is due to begin, it's on time, always has to be exactly on time, which is a very Japanese and a very non-Chinese thing, by the way.
Guy Windsor
It’s also a very me thing, all my classes, they start on time. Once in 22 and a half years of doing this full time for a living, one seminar of mine started three minutes late, because I got stuck behind a series of tractors. And a two hour drive took me three hours. And my class started three minutes late. And to this day, it haunts me.
Jonathan Bluestein
Let me tell you something, I would just diverge here for one second, just to say, I used to be like that. And then I had this whole problem with how do you deal with adults who are late, you know, I mean, I’m an adult, you’re an adult.
Guy Windsor
Pushups.
Jonathan Bluestein
I agree, I would put them in the horse stance, you know, I'd say yeah, that's good training, you know. So what you would do in the years prior is, you're five minutes late. That's five minutes in horse stance. By the way in Chinese, horse step and horse stance, because the steps are supposed to be dynamic, but that's another thing. So you get to stand for 10 minutes, which is really, really hard. By the time they were supposed to be 15 minutes late, they'd rather just not come rather than stand for 15 minutes.
Guy Windsor
My solution was the class starts on time. If the warm up is still going on, you could just do 10 push ups and join the warm up. If the warm up is over, you've missed the class, but you're welcome to stay and watch for as long as you want. And it was never any kind of you've been naughty, it was just, we want everyone to go through the warm up so that they are safe to do the joint locks and things we're going to be doing. To my mind, it was more of a, it's better for the teacher that they know who's going to be in their class so they don't have to deal with late entries. And it's better for the students present if everyone has warmed up and gotten to know each other done the whole kind of easing into the whole class mentality thing. It works.
Jonathan Bluestein
These are good solutions, they work. But what happened was over time, I just shifted and I began to do things to Chinese way. What Chinese teachers do is simply the teacher declares it’s this or that hour at the park. And people just come. But it only works because the way I teach a class is at times they will practice together. And much of the time they practice by themselves or with me. I go between people, I constantly shift to spend half a minute with this person, half a minute on the next person, next person. Then someone might ask a good question and I bring them all together to work on that thing I wanted to explain to them. So it's a little more laid back to begin with. And therefore what they do nowadays, they know that I'll be at the park for two to two and a half hours on a given day. And they can come whenever they like and they can leave whenever they like. But it's recommended the com e for at least an hour and a half, many come for two hours. And the first person that comes we do, or several people come together, we do bowing. Seated bowing like they do in traditional Japanese martial arts. And the last people that remain we also do bowing. But for people who come in the middle of it, we do standing salutations, which is the Chinese way to start and close a class. So I combined both. By the way, the reason that I started if the bowing thing, it used to be Chinese, the tradition came from China, the Chinese just really let it go over the years, is that Israelis are very unruly, and I felt that I needed to literally bow them down. Yes, and have them wear traditional attire and show a little bit more respect. Otherwise, the classes were chaotic. I started very casual, when I started teaching there were no uniforms, no bowing, no calling me Shifu. Within a few months, I thought if I was not going to introduce those concepts, things are going to remain chaotic. And this is going to go nowhere.
Guy Windsor
This is an interesting point. Every culture, I have groups I train with all over the world. And every single one of them has a different culture. And it reflects the needs of the local situation. And in some areas, what they need is a clear hierarchy and a clear rank structure so that students can progress through the equivalent of like belt ranks, we don't use belts, but you get the idea. Other places, I just sort of turn up, and there's a bunch of people there, and we just decide what we're going to do. And then we just sort of do it and they all have a nice time. And it's basically a totally flat hierarchy. And there's no kind of rank development of any kind. I don't actually care. What I care about is the students who come get what they came for, and leave healthier and better martial artists than they were when they arrived. That's it. And whatever local structure is necessary to help that to happen. That's what we use. So again, some places use uniforms, some places don't, and it is very much culturally dependent. And it's interesting to hear that, you know, if I go and teach in Israel, I need to make sure that they are wearing uniforms, and they call me Dr Windsor or Sir or something. And, you know, just give them a bit of external structure, because otherwise it would be chaos. That's a useful tip.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yeah. Just following with what you're just saying. I was told that in Germany, they expect a strong leader, we also see it historically. And they desire that the person who's going to teach them has to have the right qualifications, and also the right attitude to be able, he doesn't have to be cocky, but he has to be able to prove to them that he does know better. And this is a German cultural expectation because in their minds, it goes like, you know, if he's not better than I then why am I even here? He has to be an expert.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And you say that and I teach quite often in Germany. And although, depending on where I am, the whole hierarchy thing doesn't necessarily even apply. They do like the fact that I've got a PhD, that's like, yes, it's Dr Windsor. That's good. And you know, Lufthansa is one of the very few airlines in the world where when you book your ticket, you have a whole load of different potential titles. Ryanair, you’re Mr, Mrs, Ms or Miss, that's it. But on Lufthansa, it's are you doctor, are you Professor Doctor? If you've got two doctorates, you could be Professor Doctor Doctor. They've got you covered. But again, that's just a cultural thing. And yeah, I don't care either way. My students will call me Guy these days. But going to a new area, it's helpful to know what those students need culturally speaking, to get them into the mindset where they will get the best out of the seminar.
Jonathan Bluestein
Israelis typically believe that they know better than everybody and don't expect the hierarchy, but they respect the hierarchy imposed upon them. So it's not like the Japanese who desire the hierarchy. In Japanese culture, there needs to be a certain measure of hierarchy for them to feel comfortable with the organisation to begin with. Israelis are not in actual psychological need of hierarchy. But without hierarchy, they quickly begin to think why couldn't they just do this technique that way? Just try it.
Guy Windsor
It's one of the few modern nations that still has conscription, for good kind of historical reasons. But it's that sort of that imposition of society is in a position to literally require a year or whatever it is of your life.
Jonathan Bluestein
It's actually three years for me. Yeah, three years for men and two years for women.
Guy Windsor
What service did you do?
Jonathan Bluestein
I began as an infantry men with the Golani Brigade, 13th battalion, and following my infantry bootcamp, I was injured so my medical profile was lowered, you get a medical score. And if the score is too low due to an injury or an illness or whatnot, then you cannot be an infantry. So they transferred me to the Israeli police force, which is unusual. There aren't a lot of people who do the mandatory service with the Israeli police force the majority of them just work for nine on one and but I was, for some let's just see internal politicking, talking the right way to the right people I got myself into investigations. So okay, I was with the Major Crimes Unit. Tel Aviv central unit, in Jaffa, rapists, arsonists, murderers, crime families stuff like that.
Guy Windsor
Wow. Yeah. So that's a fascinating way to do some national service.
Jonathan Bluestein
Oh, certainly it was. So that was over two and a half years of my life spent there. It's a 24-hour job. On paper it's a nine-hour workday. On average, it's a 12-hour workday. And if you happen to arrest the whole crime family, that's a four day without any sleep workday.
Guy Windsor
Wow. Yeah. A friend of mine got a job where he said, well, this is a halftime job, right? And they said, what do you mean? He said, well, it's 12 hours per day, but I get to choose which 12. And they were like, yeah, okay, you get it, in you come.
Jonathan Bluestein
Exactly. Yeah, I’d probably say we were understaffed. I don't think there's a country where there are too many policemen. It doesn't tend to happen.
Guy Windsor
Well, I mean, I don't know. There are certainly areas where the police are given too much money to buy tanks.
Jonathan Bluestein
That certainly happens. There could be there are always certain departments within the police force in every nation that get too much money and get to too many men, but for the most part, most police are understaffed. But we have to go back, we were just talking about hierarchy at the Dojo, right? So the class begins and they all sit in a row and traditionally, the lower ranking belts are one side and the higher ranking belts on the other side, you're positioned based on your belt rank, and then the most senior black belt or two of them or the Sensei’s assistants are sitting next to them, and that assistant might sit diagonally while the Sensei sits right in front of the others, and then they all bow to the Sensei and then they all bow to the assistant and then they bow back to them. And then they turn sideways and bow to each other. Before all of that they bow to the Shomen, which is the main wall, where they have a little temple.
Guy Windsor
Like an icon, or an altar.
Jonathan Bluestein
The idea is it's a Shinto religious icon. Now the intention is not religious in most western dojos. But it stands to the little temple. On the Kamidana, a Kamidana is literally in Japanese the ‘spirit shelf’, it's the little shelf that they put their little wooden temple on top of. And the wooden temple represents the physical manifestation of the spirit of the place, because like I said, in Shinto, everything and every place has its spirit. So you bow to the spirit of the place. And then there are often pictures of founders or previous teachers on the walls. You bow to them and then the Sensei, the assistant, then the students do to one another, and then you can begin the class. And then during the class before each partner practice, you bow to one another, etc. If the teacher says “Yame”, stop, everybody stops like robots, right? It's immediately. Of course, it's very important in all of martial arts.
Guy Windsor
We have the same thing in all of my classes, because it could be everyone needs to stop because we're about to do something else. But it could also be everyone needs to stop because the practice is getting dangerous, and someone's about to have an accident. And so we have to stop right now.
Jonathan Bluestein
Exactly, yeah. But you can see, when you experienced this at the Japanese dojo, you see the level of obedience, and the seriousness of how people perceive it to be, it's different. And they're all, of course, dressed in pure white and white is a pure colour. There's the black belt hierarchy. And I know of Dojos that have restrooms and toilets which are black belts only. It’s a thing.
Guy Windsor
Oh, Jesus. Okay, all right. So you're getting into lots of detail about how some Japanese Dojos are run. But we sort of skipped over the whole politics thing.
Jonathan Bluestein
So it leads to it. So what happens is, if I have my own showers and toilets that are different to yours, then am I better than you? If I'm a black belt, senior black belts have their pictures on the wall, and your picture’s not on the wall. So of course, first of all, you can look at it two different ways or both together: you can be jealous, or you can say, oh, I aspire to that. I also want my picture on the wall. Or I can be jealous and want my picture on the wall. And maybe he got the better position for his picture. Why shouldn’t my picture be higher than this picture? I just landed a kick on this guy. He's been training for 10 years. I've only been training for a year. I think I’m better than him in sparring yesterday. So shouldn't my picture be on the wall? And then I go and I tell them my friend, I should be promoted already. Why haven't you been promoted? Why don't you go to the Sensei? And you go to Sensei, and you say Sensei, I'm very serious. I want to teach this martial art in the future and say you've been around longer. Say you're a brown belt, you've been around for 4 or 5, 6, 7 years. And the sensei has his gears turning in his head. He thinks these other three black belts I have actually suck. But this brown belt….
Guy Windsor
That Sensei is a dick.
Jonathan Bluestein
Of course, I'm just giving you actual examples of how things how the politics transpire. The Sensei thinks this guy actually wants to train this guy, he's a better fighter than them. Maybe I should promote him. And then in six months, I should get him the next black belt. And I should accelerate his progress because there is an interest here. Maybe the Sensei likes him better as a person. Maybe he's a better martial artist. And the Sensei, he wants to promote him quicker. So he can open another Dojo for him, which could be mean more respect, or more money or both. Maybe, just maybe, that also happens the student happens to be female, and something's going on between her and the sensei. So this is just random examples of things that actually do on occasion happen in traditional martial arts. And that's how people think. Another example could be a bunch of teachers, not just sensei. Doesn't have to be from Japanese martial arts. And they’re buddies, they meet every Friday and they have a sit down and talk martial arts and life. And one guy says, your Dojo looks kind of empty, you've been teaching for 30 years, I really want to give you something, you're my friend, I'll give you an award. So he awards him for this and this teacher of the year or Lifetime Achievement Award, blah, blah, blah. And then the guy hangs it on the wall of his school, then the fellow who got the lifetime award goes a few months later, and he does a special ceremony in his school. And he gives this other friend an honorary black belt, which yes, there is such a thing like an honorary academic degree, honorary black belt in his style that other guy never actually trained them. And then the guy who got the honorary black belt can say I'm also a black belt in that style, like people say, I'm a doctor, and it's the honorary doctorate.
Guy Windsor
Again, only a dick.
Jonathan Bluestein
Well, you say that, but it's quite common.
Guy Windsor
Like, if you have an honorary doctorate, I know people who have honorary doctorates, and they don't call themselves Doctor So and So. And you know, they maybe have an honorary doctorate in law, for example, and they don't claim to be a lawyer based on an honorary doctorate in law.
Jonathan Bluestein
Oh, well, you wouldn't want to do that here in Israel.
Guy Windsor
Exactly, exactly. So what you're describing at the moment is basically, people who are arseholes behaving badly. But I'm more interested in the politics that comes about when people who are acting in good faith, nonetheless end up creating schisms and camps and end up at loggerheads with each other. Without this sort of scheming, or conniving or underhand stuff. I mean, you see in the historical martial arts world all the time, there are people who are, for example, studying the works of Fiore dei Liberi, as I do. And they are divided into camps based on how they interpret a specific bit of the book, or how well they adapt Fiore’s art to the modern tournament scene or whatever. And you end up with people who, on the face of it, they should be all getting along, because they all love the same sources, and they all train and they're all serious about it. And they're all nice to their students. And we're not talking about dicks here. But still, nonetheless, because of the natural human tendency for people to identify with a tribe. And what is outside my tribe is therefore by definition other and therefore shouldn't be trusted. You get this sort of separation into specific camps. Twenty years ago, if you showed up to a historical fencing event, it didn't really matter what you studied, it didn't really matter what level you were at, because there were so few of us that the notion of oh, my God, you're mad about swords and you think the historical sources are cool, brilliant. You're definitely one of us. Welcome to the tribe. But as the tribe grew bigger and bigger and bigger, and yes, there were some bad actors. But leaving those aside, even the good actors naturally sort of separated themselves out into camps. And sometimes in those camps, a myth of superiority over other camps develops. Not because of any one person saying bad things about other people, but it's just, if you have that kind of looking inwards towards your tribe viewpoint, you will tend to see it through rose tinted spectacles. And when you look outside, you're looking perhaps more rationally. And so you get this siloing of what was what was a small, relatively harmonious community. That's debatable. But it's silos and it becomes unnecessarily fragmented, simply because people identify with tribes.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes, I think that tradition naturally gives rise to politics. Because once you have to define what the thing is, then you have to define the borders. And anybody who then steps outside of those borders is a traitor, an outsider, he's a bad person, you know, but I have a very good example to provide for you in that regard. So what often happens especially in the Chinese martial arts, in the Japanese martial arts, they tend to write down much if not all of their curriculum. So I have a brown belt. And this is the list of things that I'm going to be studying as a brown belt, give or take. And as a third degree black belt, this is what is expected of me. In the Chinese martial arts not so. I do make an effort to write much of my curriculum down. But there's so much wisdom, which is contained between the lines in the heart-to-heart transmission between the teacher and the student. And what the Chinese teachers have done all throughout history is that they don't give an equal measure of knowledge to all of their students. Now, this has to do with Confucian culture. So Confucius taught, we know this from the Confucian Analects, in which is a book written by his students, because he did not write anything. In the Analects there's one verse that says, something along the lines of, and I'm hoping, quoting, very accurately here, if I give the student one quarter, and the student cannot enquire and come back to me with the other three quarters, then I would not bother to teach that student again. So there's a cultural expectation by teachers in China, not just martial arts teachers, but all traditionally minded teachers in China for 1000s of years now, that it doesn't have to be on a given one quarter, to come back with the other three quarters, but I need to be able to give to provide a foundation then give out hints, and the student needs to work hard to comprehend the greater bulk of it on their own. Otherwise, they're not learning. Otherwise, I'm spoon feeding them. So Chinese teachers, traditionally what they will do, if the student is lazy, or is not scholarly gifted, at least in terms of studying the martial arts, not necessarily in terms of reading and such because most of Chinese martial arts teachers throughout history have been illiterate. If this or if they just don't like that student, or maybe they have good reasons to not trust that student. Maybe that student killed somebody in a brawl. And maybe he killed somebody in the brawl before they were their student. But since they killed a person, maybe they cannot be trusted. Maybe that student is involved in some shady business, maybe that student belongs with a gang, et cetera. So often in a traditional Japanese dojo, and there would be exceptions. If a student belongs in a gang, they would tell him quit the gang or you're out, or they wouldn't even have him as a student at the dojo. Again, there are exceptions, but generally speaking. A Chinese teacher would say, yeah, so what? So he's in a gang, that's his own life. He can be a gang. None of my business. I'll teach him to the extent that I feel comfortable with, given I know he is a gang member, which might be a lot, or might not be much, but he's a paying student, isn't he? What's wrong here? If he does something bad, that's on him, that's not on me. That's a very Chinese way to think about relationships in general. They don't assume personal responsibility much for the actions of another person. In the West, we have this Judeo-Christian conception of, you know, if my son went and killed somebody that I'm guilty. I'm a bad father, what kind of education did I give that person in, he’s my own son. In Chinese culture, yeah, they might feel bad, but it's not that they're not moral. On average, they are just as moral as any other human on the planet. It's just that culturally, they say everybody has their own karma. Everybody has their own life. Maybe I did my best. He a problem person. All right. It's just a part of life. So how does that lead to politics? So what happens is this: with a Chinese teacher, let's say the Chinese teacher had 10 students, and those 10 students each spent 20 years, no less, with their teacher. So 10 students each for 20 years. By the end of those 20 years with a traditionally minded Chinese martial arts teacher, each of them is going to go into come out with a very different take, a very different take on the exact same system. To a degree. Now, of course, that happens in all of martial arts, but in Chinese martial arts, that can be to the degree that some of them are really high-level practitioners who know the whole system, and some of them are still around the same level they were at after a year or two of training.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. So they didn’t have 20 years of training, they had one year of training 20 times.
Jonathan Bluestein
Exactly. The interesting thing Is that can happen organically as a result of bad practice. But in Chinese martial arts, that often happens with the teacher intending this to happen. The teachers intend to keep some people at the level of one or two years and keep them there. Because they didn't like the person or the person couldn't be trusted, or whatever.
Guy Windsor
That’s outrageous. If I had a student like that as like, okay, I'm happy to give you your first year of training, but I think you're a dick, I do not want to give you any more than that. I would have to say, look, I just don't want to teach you anymore.
Jonathan Bluestein
So you see, this has to do with your background in jurisprudence, you have a cultural background in jurisprudence. I have a legal education. I have a law degree and I have a Government Studies degree. What you're just talking about is actually a cultural perception of contractual law. So if you think about it, you're just talking about the type of contract that is between a teacher and the student. What kind of unwritten contract do we have? Can we say that within that contract, as a teacher, you are obligated to ensure to the best of your ability that the student keeps progressing, as the years go by, and you say Guy, you believe wholeheartedly, as most people would believe, by the way, in the West, that it is most certainly your responsibility to push that student forward as much as possible under the circumstances.
Guy Windsor
Hang on, no. I would say I have to give them my best efforts, and an environment in which, if they choose to take the opportunities in front of them, they will progress as well as they reasonably could. I'm not so much into the pushing the students and more into creating a space in front of them for them to step into if they want to. But contractually speaking, yes, they're entitled to my best efforts. And if I'm not willing to give those best efforts, I am morally obliged to make it clear to the students that I am not going to give them my best efforts, and they should go somewhere else.
Jonathan Bluestein
That is give or take exactly what I believe, as a person as a teacher. We must understand, though, that this is a cultural perception. For the Chinese teacher, there's nothing morally wrong in them saying, for whatever reason, he didn't earn it, that's his problem. So they would say, for example, I'll give you the counter argument, the Chinese teacher would say, well, this person didn't try to transform so they didn't become a better person individually. So why am I obligated? You remember the three quarters? He didn't come to me with the other three quarters. And the Chinese teacher would say in their minds, because there's actually no debate on these topics in Chinese culture that I've ever seen. So curiously, the Chinese amongst themselves don't even talk about it. It's a non-issue for them, but in their minds they say, he's been around five years, 10 years? Can't he see that he's still the same level he was after a year or two?
Guy Windsor
Yeah, so why hasn’t he quit?
Jonathan Bluestein
That's on him, he should go to another teacher. That's not my problem. That's on him.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay, I can see that.
Jonathan Bluestein
It gets worse. Because, say that teacher died prematurely. Maybe that teacher was 50, 60 years old, and he suddenly passed away, he has a heart attack or whatever. And then the school remains with a bunch of students who've actually studied most or the whole system. And a bunch of people who had gotten that ill treatment of staying that same year for 20 years. And the ones that got the more complete transmission, some of them go and open two or three schools, and the other ones who were stepping in place for 20 years. They see their friends, and they say, I can open a school as well. So now they're going to open a school, and the curriculum is going to be very low level. And they won't even comprehend the curriculum. Otherwise, they if they understood their low level, typically they wouldn't even try to open a school unless they're business minded and they want to make money. And then they teach students and then those students might not only get the lower quality curriculum, but those people who were stuck in place for 20 years might choose certain students to treat the same and then these students will be even worse.
Guy Windsor
So you get martial arts basically watered down to nothing.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes, it is one of the many ways that martial arts can go extinct. They become diluted due to interpersonal politics over generations. And it's not a new thing. I think it's been happening at least in China for centuries.
Guy Windsor
It’s been happening in every area of life where skill is transmitted, since forever. Yeah, again, it's a natural human thing.
Jonathan Bluestein
But that particular dynamic when the teacher feels that he doesn't have the commitment to teach a “nobody”, his thing, I will say he’s not nobody, that guy spent 20 years with you, also paid every month for 20 years. So what's up? That's nobody, why? And that takes us another direction, which is how the Chinese perceive the relationships in martial arts lineages. And that is, unlike the Japanese, were in Japanese traditions, it's typically very hierarchical, and more meritocratic. In Chinese martial arts it's family based. So the martial arts school is a family. But you don't get to be a part of the family by merely paying monthly tuition.
Guy Windsor
I have a friend who was legally adopted by his Grandmaster before he opened his school.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes, yes, this is common. So what we do is, when you step into the school for the first time, you're quote, unquote, a paying customer. That's how a lot of Chinese people would view you. You're a paying customer or you come in, you get the service, you get what you paid for, and what you're worth, not just what I'm worth, but also what you are worth, if you've proven yourself over the years, and to prove oneself, we'll get to that in a moment what that could mean, you may be adopted into the martial arts family. Now, usually, there's no legal papers, but you undergo a ceremony called the Bai Shi, to bow down to the teacher. And traditionally the custom is the teacher sits on a chair, you kneel on the floor, and you bow down to them, like you would bow to a king in medieval times. Bow down with your head to the floor three times, you offer them a cup of tea, they drink the tea, you might offer them a gift. In my case, it always has to be a very modest gift. I ask for something very modest, very small, it's only symbolic, but some in China, they often give a red envelope, has to be red, that is the is the colour of success, of money, of prosperity, of joy. A red envelope with money. Some Chinese teachers are quite greedy, you know, people can put in $10,000 in the red envelope. But I would say that's not even the majority. So it's usually symbolic. There'll be things said, in my case, what they do is, there is a ceremony beforehand. Before all that ceremonial stuff, sorry, we would have speeches, I will give a speech about the student, the student would give a speech about their experiences at the school. There would be witnesses, you bring most of the other students to witness the event, even those who are not within the martial arts family. You'd bring your teachers if you can. And it's sort of like a wedding, people call it that. You wed into the system and you take on a vow to continue, you say you carry on the system. But actually, it's not about carrying on the system as much as it is carrying on your relationship in a familial way, with your teacher for the rest of your life. So the obligations taken are the teacher ought to take care of you, as if you were his son, and you take care of the teacher as if he was your father. It doesn't mean your father and the son. The relationship is not the same. And oftentimes, the student might be older than you. So obviously, he cannot be your son. But you take care of one another like family, and once a student has been introduced into the martial arts family, then there are no secrets, there are no borders, and it's the complete opposite of being a paying customer. Now, the teacher would treat you as if he was teaching his son. So now the metric for success is your success is my success and there are great efforts been undertaken so you can get the farthest within the scope of the tradition as possible. Now as to what makes a disciple is something I've written about before in my book, The Martial Arts Teacher is also going to appear in my soon to be published book, I hope to finish it within two or three months, Martial Arts Politics Explained. I introduce my standards and each teacher has his own different standards as to how should a person prove themselves to be worthy of becoming a member of the martial arts family. So they have to have a good heart, they have to have a good name, they have to be practicing hard, not necessarily for a specific number of years because people vary, right, some people can prove themselves, technically speaking within five years, others after 10 years. And there's several other parameters and such. In my case, the students undergo two different types of tests. One is a technical test, they have to go past a certain level of the curriculum just to pass that limit, in order to see that they're really serious. That's like, either an equivalent of a black belt test, we don't have ranks in the same way though. And the other one is a personal test. So that is designated for each student based on something which is very difficult for them to do. So my two disciples that I've taken until today, one had a problem with personal drive and perseverance. So his test was, you have to practice. Now, I wouldn't be there for all the time. But you have to practice every day, for six hours a day for a month, because he was young, he was 18 years old. He had this strength and stamina for it, but he needed the drive. So I gave him the drive. He also had the time. And then that person eventually became a top film editor in Hollywood with that kind of drive. He’s stopped practicing martial arts, but I figure some of it worked. Because he wouldn't have had that type of drive before. Something transitioned, something transformed. He doesn't practice martial arts, but I consider him a great success.
Guy Windsor
Of course. I have students like that, where they stopped doing the stuff that I teach, but they use the stuff that I've taught them to do very well elsewhere. Yeah, that's very satisfying.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yeah. So I'm saying is sometimes some of our best students are not our best students in the martial arts. And the other fellow he was smoking for 20 years. And it was very difficult. He told me a number of times, it was very difficult for him to quit. So I told him, there would be no smokers in my martial arts family. And that was it. He had to quit smoking. For him that was a very difficult ordeal. And he did. Now unfortunately, he then kept smoking pot, because I was talking about cigarettes. I didn't know about the pot.
Guy Windsor
So he finessed it a little bit. Okay. But he quit cigarettes, which is a good thing.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yeah, that's pretty good. Okay, I think, for every student, that should be a different personal test. And even if they are no longer with you, at least they have made a personal transformation, which is very important. And it is considered acceptable because of that familial structure. Okay, you want to be a part of this martial arts family, then prove yourself in some way. And sometimes, just practicing, you can force yourself through a physical practice to get a certain level, because it's not a very high level to get into a martial arts family. But the personal test is the real hard one. And traditionally, what the Chinese do, a lot of Chinese teachers say, there is an idiom, 10 years to get through the door. They would like to observe a person for 10 years, at least, before they're willing to accept them as disciples. ‘Disciple’ in Chinese that is the traditional term. And the longer I teach, the more I see that, indeed, that is not a radical way of thinking about it. Because you don't live with those people. They're not your romantic partners. If a romantic partner, maybe you know them very well after a year and a half or two years. But if you don't live with the person, it could take upwards of 10 years sometimes to really know them well. And also to see that essentially for a decade, they haven't screwed up in a big way.
Guy Windsor
Or an unrecoverable way. Okay, so, you contacted me to ask about how things are done in historical martial arts, and you’ve spent a lot of time telling us about how things are done in the Asian martial arts. What did you actually want to know from me?
Jonathan Bluestein
Okay, so specifically, we just described the six main types of schools that are common in martial arts today, the most common, which were the sports club, the dojo, the Wuguan, the call to the temple, and the recreational and because Historical European Martial Arts are in development tradition, which is just now falling into different sub styles and divisions, I would first like to ask, how do you see those schools in light of those six categories, which I was just describing?
Guy Windsor
Okay. I would say that the club, so stables and gym distinction, there are quite a few stables who are aimed at basically producing tournament winners. There are a lot of gyms who are basically aimed at giving people a fun way to get fit and stay fit and pursue personal goals and, and yes, tournaments, they may go to tournaments, they may not. But the club does not define its success by the number of tournament winners that it has. We certainly see a lot of recreational clubs. I would say that most of the Society for Creative Anachronism clubs that I have come across, I would put in that camp, they're not particularly interested in winning tournaments. It's not really a gym, either. They don't really train like that at all. It's mostly people show up and they get given a little bit of basic instruction, and then they just fence their friends. And so it's recreational. But I don't mean that term, to suggest that it's trivial in these people's lives. It is a very, very important part of their social life and their sense of community. So there's elements of as you're describing the dojo as like a community centre. There's quite a lot of that going on. So we don't see temples in the historical martial arts tradition, particularly.
Jonathan Bluestein
Not yet.
Guy Windsor
Not yet. Yeah.
Jonathan Bluestein
By the way, if I were to predict, because I have a good friend, Grandmaster Keith Kernspecht, are you familiar with him? So he's the most successful European Martial Arts teacher to have ever lived, perhaps, in history, because prior to COVID, his organization, he teaches Wing Chun, his organization had 60,000 students all from Europe, which is bigger than gets a lot of students and Grandmaster Kernspecht, back in the day in between, roughly the mid 1980s, if I'm not mistaken, then beginning of the 21st century, he rented a castle in Germany as his headquarters.
Guy Windsor
Good for him. That's not historical martial arts. That's Wing Chun.
Jonathan Bluestein
He did a little bit of recreated Historical European Martial Arts there.
Guy Windsor
There are lots of people who have swung longswords and rapiers and things around, and have done all sorts of sort of experimenting with it. The most famously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s grandson in the 1950s borrowed armour from his grandpa's house, obviously Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s long dead by this point, but they were strapping on actual genuine 15th century suits of armour, and whacking their friends. That's not historical martial arts, because it's not based on historical research.
Jonathan Bluestein
I know what you're saying. And I am in agreement, there's a good friend of Grandmaster Kernspecht is Grandmaster Bill Newman, who actually started with escrima. And he over the years he’s transitioning to using European weapons, I'm not sure how manual based he is, but Bill Newman is also quite well known. And he done a lot of European weapons fighting, not historical European Martial Arts.
Guy Windsor
European weapons fighting is a better way to describe it. And you can, if you study escrima, or any other kind of weapons-based art, you can pick up a sword of any kind and do something useful with it.
Jonathan Bluestein
So the whole point was saying that, in my view, it's only a matter of time before somebody takes the initiative, and create a “Temple like” school in a castle.
Guy Windsor
There will be eventually. So a lot of these clubs and schools, and there are various formal structures for them, they take their format from a martial art that the teacher has previously studied. So for example, in my school, the uniform for those groups that use uniforms is a white t shirt, dark trousers, with the school logo on the chest. And I just stole that from a friend of mine who used to run a kung fu school where that was a uniform and I was like, that is completely non cultural. It's just like, sort of trousers that you find in pretty much every culture that does trousers and a T shirt. The problem is, one of the things that we have to deal with as historical martial artists, is we have to see how the clothing of the period affects the movement style of the period and various other things. So one of the things we need to do is actually have period gear that's made properly. And wear that and use that in the research process. But the problem with that is, I teach like, six or seven different historical styles, I am not going to require that my students have six or seven different suits of historical gear for each different style. And in a given night, I might teach three of those different styles to three different groups of students. And I'm not going to be changing my clothes between classes. It doesn't make sense.
Jonathan Bluestein
In that way, you're similar in concept to Masaaki Hatsumi Sensei from Japan, you know him? Yeah. Because he went, and he studied with those elderly masters of ninjutsu and samurai arts, and he brought in nine different styles under one umbrella and created his Bujinkan. Now, fans of Bujinkan and people who can't stand it, I'm not getting into that. But I'm just saying, conceptually, is very interesting, because his school looks like a bigger version of your office with all the books and different weapons hung from the many different traditions. And then he has to bring all of these styles together under one roof, which is a big challenge.
Guy Windsor
One thing that I don't do, I don't combine the styles. If I was teaching as a language teacher, and I could teach French and Italian and Hebrew. I wouldn't teach my students a mixture of French, Italian and Hebrew. My Hebrew students would learn Hebrew from me, not that I speak a word of it. My French students would learn French from me and so on. It's like that, they are absolutely distinct. Because if you start to blend them together, what you get is a kind of anti-historical mess.
Jonathan Bluestein
Let me ask you about that, as I'm very curious, because in Chinese martial arts, one of the things that ease people's attempts to combine different styles. I didn't know about the Bujinkan scenario, because I'm not familiar enough with those different traditions. But in Chinese martial arts, they all share the same movement concepts. So they all share the same types of steps in combat, or very similar ones. They also share a very similar culture. So for example, concept of Yin and Yang, what does it mean where your palm faces this way or that way? Is that the Yin or Yang? Well, most Chinese styles would agree, even if they look very different, because conceptually, they're closer like that, due to their shared culture. It's easier for them to speak with one another and to integrate if they so of desire.
Guy Windsor
Whereas the styles that I'm teaching, come from wildly different cultures. And so for example, the footwork and mechanics we use for early 17th century Italian rapier are totally inappropriate for early 15th century Italian knightly combat. The culture itself that they're coming from, isn't that distinct, but the marshal context in which these actions are going to be applied? Completely different. So blending early 15th century Italian longsword with early 17th century Italian rapier, it would just be a disaster. Although people do do it in tournaments all the time, so there we go. But my point is, basically, I come from, I come from a specific, specific to me, I mean, background, I've had this Tai Chi teacher, and I've been to that karate class, and I studied this Kung Fu and that Aikido and blah, blah, blah. And so I've been influenced by these various teachers. Just to keep in with the tradition thing. My Tai Chi teacher’s name was Steve Fox, his wife is Katie Fox, Katie Fox trained with Cheng Man Ching. So that's my Tai Chi lineage because I know Chinese martial artists care about that sort of thing. So that has impacted how I run my classes, how I ran my school when I was running it as a specific training environment. And I've seen people who've come from a much more sport fencing background. I mean, I did have a lot of sport fencing in my background. But I took my martial arts school structures from, I guess, I was mostly influenced by Japanese and Chinese martial arts that I've practiced in the way I set up my school.
Jonathan Bluestein
That’s interesting, because you mentioned you study the Chen Man Ching lineage. And that is a very laid back type of school.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, very laid back. I love it. Like, there's no ranks, no bowing or anything. It was all just, you know, we showed up, Steve through us through the walls. And then we figured out how to throw each other through the walls. And it was great fun.
Jonathan Bluestein
Because we should tell the listeners that Chen Man Ching was an artist, a painter. And a big drinker.
Guy Windsor
Total alcoholic.
Jonathan Bluestein
So he was a very laid back type of person.
Guy Windsor
And his lineage begins with him. And he began it in the 1940s. So it's a very recent Tai Chi lineage too. But if we go to some of my colleagues in America, their club or school that they have founded, will be coming from a different set of backgrounds, and maybe they come from sport fencing. So the structure of the classes is closer to a sport fencing class. And the way the whole thing is run is closer to how sport fencing is taught and trained. Other people are coming from a reenactment or living history or SCA background. And so again, they're structuring their club completely differently. So some clubs have formal rank structures, some clubs have no hierarchy at all, some clubs are very strict and formal in the way things are taught, some clubs have a lot more play. It's because we don't have a common model to draw from that the models are so widely different. There's no such thing as like a standard historical martial arts school or club in the world, that doesn't exist.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yes, of course, that makes sense. I mean, the standardisation that came about in Chinese martial arts, first of all, it took probably 1000s of years. And secondly, it was greatly strengthened by two cultural elements. One was the military because the Chinese martial arts arise from three sources primarily, one is the military, the other is civilian life and the third is temples and those three sources the military, the civilian life and temples also share knowledge with one another as in, what happens was, is typically, people become conscripted, then they learn some martial arts, which are required for military service. Typically, the focus would have been on the sword and the spear. So the curved single handed, sometimes the double handed sword called a Dao. Not the same, by the way as the Dao like the way the Dao from the Tao Te Ching, just sounds a little bit different in Chinese. And the spear was the primary Chinese military weapon for many centuries.
Guy Windsor
It was the primary European military weapon for centuries too. Swords just got all the glory. Spears did all the actual work. Pretty much.
Jonathan Bluestein
Although I would be inclined to believe that the Chinese use swords a tad more than the Romans and Greeks did.
Guy Windsor
Okay, the Roman legionaries, their primary killing weapon was the Gladius. They would get in close with their shields and they would have this short stabbing sword that they're going stab, stab, stab. That's I think how Romans killed in actual like battle and leaving aside the sort of siege engines and projectile weapons, their artillery basically.
Jonathan Bluestein
So the gladius, and the spatha later.
Guy Windsor
The spatha was the cavalry sword. As I understand it, Roman history is not my area of expertise. So I may be talking out of my arse, but as I understand it, I think most of the close quarters killing by Roman legionaries was done with the Gladius. That's my understanding anyway.
Jonathan Bluestein
Notice how interesting that both the Greeks and the Romans had a very strong preference for a relatively straight swords, whilst the Chinese although for some periods is straight swords for almost exclusive in military use, in other periods alongside the straight swords and often more so than the straight swords. They had curved swords and not necessarily so there's a curved sword that looks like a katana or a longer katana. We spoke about the Miao Dao earlier, but that Dao is shorter.
Guy Windsor
It’s basically a scimitar, or a cutlass.
Jonathan Bluestein
Exactly. And when you use a sword like that, it also changes the way you move. So you need rounder motions to take advantage of the curved blade, in order to slice and the way that it cuts. I do believe that the reason that the Chinese had a greater proclivity and preference for these types of blades has to do with their preference for circularity, and round movements and concepts in their own culture.
Guy Windsor
But those round movements, they don't work terribly well in line of battle.
Jonathan Bluestein
It depends on whether they had shields or they did not have shields, what kind of opponents they're facing. Let us remember, for example, that the Chinese Yuan dynasty was founded by the Mongols. And when they were fighting the Mongols, again, I'm not a military expert, but I think that that wouldn't have looked like the same as the Romans would fight the Germans.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, we're not talking about line of battle. Basically the Mongols fought closer to the way the Germans fought and the Romans came up with this system, a lot like a Greek phalanx where you have basically a line of shields and a line of spears behind them. And then you get in close and you stab, stab, stab. And you're not fighting individually. You're fighting entirely as a unit.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yeah, so but we should remember that a lot of the scimitars that we know of are somewhat more curved than the Chinese dao. Yeah. So the dao, the curve is somewhere between that scimitar and the straight sword.
Guy Windsor
Here's an interesting thought for you. In European art, it is very rare, shall we say before 1800. It is rare to see a man holding a curved sword. Almost invariably if there's a curved sword, it's a picture of Judith, who has just slain Holofernes and she's almost always using a curved sword. So there are lots of pictures of women holding a curved sword as Judith slaying Holofernes, but it's sufficiently rare. And again, normally the only one example I can think of, and I think it's on the floor of Siena cathedral, where you have the slaughter of the innocents. So after Herod said, “Kill all the male children.” Of course, the soldiers sent out to do that, they all have curved swords, because in European culture in that period, we're talking about, shall we say, 1200 to 1600. Okay. The people who carried curved swords were the Turks. And the Christians all had straight swords. And so it's quite difficult to find pictures of men holding curved swords in art of that period, to the point that when I took my kids when they were little, ran various art galleries in Italy, for example, we spent seven hours in the Vatican Museum, oh my god, it's amazing. But I told them, I'll give you 10 cents for every time you find me a picture of a man holding a curved sword. And at the end of the day, I owed my children less than a euro each. But then, of course, my youngest daughter, found a pen and paper and drew a picture of a man holding a curved sword and said, that'd be 10 cents please Daddy.
Jonathan Bluestein
That’s a smart kid. That’s a kid that's going to buy you a nice Villa when you retire. Making money.
Guy Windsor
Maybe. The whole curved sword or straight sword thing, there's a lot of a lot of cultural stuff going on there. I don't honestly see it as a as a particularly necessarily practical usage difference. I think it's more of a, this is how our culture perceives of the archetype that is sword.
Jonathan Bluestein
I would also add that the curved swords became far more common in Chinese culture in the 18th, 19th and maybe early 20th centuries, due to their use in civilian life. So in civilian life you don't hold a line of battle, and there was a big bodyguard culture in China, especially with respect to people having to send mail and treasury across the land. China, I think it might have been up until the conquest of the nation by the communists and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. I think they did not have a national mail system.
Guy Windsor
Our national mail system was invented by the British in the early 19th century, I think.
Jonathan Bluestein
So you say that's the early 19th century. The Chinese only probably only had a good one by the mid 20th century. So that's very late. So if you needed to send anything of value, then you would send it by horse and cart. And if it was valuable, then people wanted to take it. So there were bodyguard services, guarding those caravans. Also, let's not forget the Silk Road. And the way you go walk with the caravan is actually, because there aren't a lot of bodyguards, typically they're not 100 or 200 of them, there will be five or 10 and 15. And each of them is positioned in a different spot around that caravan. One is in front, one in the back, one on each side and one in between, so they don't stand right next to one another.
Guy Windsor
So we're not talking line of battle at all.
Jonathan Bluestein
Exactly. And for these types of people, the sort of choice was often the Dao, the curved sword.
Guy Windsor
Also, just speaking of European curved swords, it occurred to me when I was speaking that when the Romans invaded Spain, they were very impressed with the weapon that the Spanish were using because they could actually cut through a legionary’s helmet. And it was a curved sword that they adopted and called the Gladius Hispaniensis. And also, the sword that Alexander the Great is reputed to have us is a Makhaira which is actually a similarly curved sword. It's sort of curves forward, like a Kukri and legend has it that the Gurkha kukri, the Gurkhas or the Nepalese people in the area, they started copying the swords that Alexander and his troops carried, so the whole curved sword thing, it's a bit more complicated than what we were saying before.
Jonathan Bluestein
I would like to ask how was it that the Spanish model was able to cut through a legionary’s helmet? Was it the steel, the design, the curviness?
Guy Windsor
I think it's the design. Basically if you think of it like a kukri, like a largish kukri. So it's got a forward curve. So the basically the sword is kind of bent forwards, and it's got a reasonably deep belly. And also, the legionary’s helmet is made of iron. It's not a tempered steel helmet, it's an iron helmet. So actually cutting through it isn't that difficult. And that's a critical thing I mentioned earlier, like armour changed dramatically in the late 14th century, it was because sometime in the 1380s, in Milan, they figured out how to make curved plates of steel, that they could actually heat treat without losing the shape, so you could get it actually properly tempered so that it was both hard and tough. Previously, they could either make it hard, or they could make it tough. And they couldn't make curved structures out of what we would think of as properly hardened steel. So plate armour really took off in a big way in the 15th century, because they could they figured out how to make this much, much more effective plate. So yeah, so it is a soft iron helmet cutting through it, it's not easy, but with the right sort of weapon, it'll go straight through.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yeah, I mean, certainly swords can cut through iron, I've seen a demonstration off a modern made Miao Dao, which is granted a much higher standard, with purified steel and factories, etc. cutting through steel pipes, it can definitely do it.
Guy Windsor
It wouldn't cut through a hardened steel pipe, it would cut through an ordinary mild steel pipe. Sure, like you can use a pair of pliers to cut through the steel link on a steel link fence. If you're doing like secret ninja shit and cutting away in through a fence like clip, clip, clip, no problem at all. Because hardened steel just cuts right through softer steel. And you can harden the steel blade in a way that you couldn't in that time, you couldn't harden a curved surface.
Jonathan Bluestein
I would like to go back on the topic of comparing the East Asian traditional martial arts with historically European martial arts. In East Asia, there was a very strong integration of either philosophy or religion or both into martial traditions and that is a big part of what helped keep those traditions alive because the Chinese have seen the martial arts as an expression of the rest of their culture. So say there was a village. And I'll give the example…
Guy Windsor
Cut to the question. We're running late on time. So cut straight to your question.
Jonathan Bluestein
So they preserved it as a cultural artifact because it had cultural, philosophical, sometimes religious value. So I wonder about is there a movement of certain people who are interested in the integration of philosophy or perhaps even religion into Historical European Martial Arts?
Guy Windsor
Yes, we do have and they are generally very problematic. So for example, there is a poisonous little subculture in Historical European Martial Arts, note the European, that want to basically hark back to the original function of well, one of the reasons the Knights were being trained in the 15th century was so they could go on crusades. So let's go to the Middle East and kill a bunch of people because we have different religious views. And so there are some kind of religious nutcases who, basically, they want to train historical martial arts because it makes them think that they're a crusader.
Jonathan Bluestein
But the enemy has AK47s.
Guy Windsor
And other means of blowing you up too. I mean, it's horrible. But there are people who are much less problematic, they have a philosophy could be based on, I mean, there are references to, for example, Greek philosophers in some of the historical martial arts texts, most famously Angelo Viggiani’s Lo Schermo, published in 1575, where he explicitly refers to Aristotle's Physics, books seven and eight. So there is a philosophical underpinning to the arts as they were then, but the philosophies that we live by now are completely different to the ones back then. There are some people who want to revive the philosophies, and practice the arts accordingly. There are some people who have a philosophy and they want to express that through their art. And there are some people who do want to kind of revive the, shall we say, problematic Christian aspect of some of these arts.
Jonathan Bluestein
What do you see of the origin of the founders of some of those styles? Did they express any religious or philosophical views?
Guy Windsor
No. Okay, if we talk about like, Liechtenauer is credited with saying something along the lines of young Knight learn to love God and honour women, so there's some sort of very general kind of, you should be a good Christian and do this, that and the other. But there isn't much in the way of specific philosophy. Except, I mean, in the 16th century, we have at least some martial artists writing books, who are coming from, Agrippa is the one that springs to mind, who was a mathematician and an architect. And his idea was recreating sword fighting from an entirely rational and mathematical perspective. This should work because it works mathematically. And that's a philosophy. But it's a philosophy of rationality, rather than philosophy, as a system of ethics.
Jonathan Bluestein
How about a social philosophy, because in the in the East Asian Arts as a whole, we were just talking about how hierarchy or family dynamics play a big role in how the schools actually function, and also a big role in how the typical politics are created.
Guy Windsor
I don't see it in the sources. So Vadi for example, in his 1480s, De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, he mentioned the sorts of people who are fit to study the art, like kings, and courtiers and princes and knights, and dukes and barons, and whatnot. And definitely, no peasants allowed. They are only fit to carry heavy loads, he says. So there are some sort of, like, only people of a certain social class should be allowed to train these arts. Which is of its time, that is quite unsurprising, and even particularly objectionable. It's just, they were all massively classes back then, because they were living in a kind of feudal society. So modern historical martial arts teachers absolutely have all sorts of social philosophies. This podcast, for instance, is entirely strategically its goal is to promote women and other underrepresented demographics, in historical martial arts.
Jonathan Bluestein
What are other underrepresented demographics?
Guy Windsor
Well, we have far fewer people of colour, for example. In America, you have a certain proportion of people who are, shall we say, not white. And they are not represented, let's say, I don't have figures on this. But let's say that was 20% or 50%, or whatever, let's say 50%. We would expect 50% of people doing historical martial arts in America to be not white, but they're mostly white. Not all, but mostly.
Jonathan Bluestein
I think people of colour in the United States are about, I can’t recall if it's 12 or 16% of the population.
Guy Windsor
And all that also depends on what you consider ‘of colour’. And that varies widely by area to some areas too.
Jonathan Bluestein
Like Louisiana, right? It's probably 40% or something.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, who knows. But the point is that I think that representation is helpful. And so finding people who are not middle aged white men like me, and bringing them onto my show, and letting the wider historical martial arts community hear from those people, it also means that someone who is listening to the show who is not a middle aged white dude sees people like themselves. Like in a martial arts class, the person that the instructor is demonstrating with is elevated above the other students in that moment. Same sort of thing, bring somebody onto my show, I am indicating to the world that their opinion is worth listening to. And so affirming their value to the community. And so people like them can see people like them in that position and hopefully be encouraged to take up historical martial arts or to when they are inevitably discouraged by showing up to an event where it's all white men go, well, hang on, maybe that's the event’s problem. That's not me.
Jonathan Bluestein
I see what you mean.
Guy Windsor
Representation matters. That is entirely a philosophical position, it’s a social philosophical position.
Jonathan Bluestein
And it's a noble take on it, I would agree, but could you describe it for perhaps philosophies that are not very disagreeable, that you came across with other teachers you know?
Guy Windsor
I know people who are explicitly trying to use historical martial arts, particularly knightly combat, as a venue to explore the virtues of knighthood, so chivalry. But chivalry, as it should have been, rather than perhaps chivalry as it actually was. So, the virtues of knighthood include things like largesse, being generous to people, giving money to charity and whatnot, and defending the weak, that sort of thing. So they are explicitly using their historical martial arts practice to promote the chivalric values.
Jonathan Bluestein
Have there been people, teachers, who considered knighting students is equivalent of like black belts and such?
Guy Windsor
Well, in the SCA, Society for Creative Anachronism, is all about that kind of stuff. They have knights and dukes and lords and all sorts of things.
Jonathan Bluestein
Could you describe the Society for a moment, that I'm not familiar with.
Guy Windsor
I am not a member. Many of my friends are members. And basically, it's called the Society for Creative Anachronism, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about it. And it has ranks and hierarchies. One of the strap lines for the society is ‘the Middle Ages as they ought to have been’. And they don't just do combat stuff. They also do things like cookery, and art and calligraphy, and all sorts of other sort of historical skill sets. And some of them to an astonishingly high level. And they have within their culture, they have kingdoms, run by kings and queens, and you become the king by winning the crown tournament. And that makes you king for like six months or a year until the next crown tournament. I've never been part of it so I don't have an in depth knowledge of it. But basically, when you join the society, you usually get some sort of patron. They're the knight, you're the squire. And you do various things for them. And they have knighting ceremonies and that sort of thing. My read of it, as an outsider who has many friends who are on the inside, my read of it is people aspire to a noble, fair culture, where there are people who are respected because they've earned that respect through their actions. And they just like the idea of there is this process I can go through where I can become a person who is respected for the actions they've done. It gives them the opportunity to do the actions that will gain the respect, and then a formal recognition of those actions. And I have friends who have orders of chivalry in the SCA, like the white scarf, which at one time was the highest award for fencing you could get in any given kingdom. It's like feudalism without the actual feudalism, in a sense.
Jonathan Bluestein
Feudalism without the money.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, feudalism without the money and without the land ownership, and without also the permanence. The king’s son is not a prince. If your dad happens to be a king in the SCA, because he's, and if you become king, I think three times, you're made a duke for life. So let's say your dad is a duke. When he dies, you don't become a duke. You can't inherit the title. Whereas in Britain, we have dukedoms, and if the Duke dies, their eldest male relative, son ideally, becomes duke.
Jonathan Bluestein
I mean, if you were to think of it, the whole state of Israel is creative anachronism. We come in after 2000 years in the diaspora. And we recreate what the state is, we hope which it ought to have been. For example, in biblical times, if there were witnesses and the Council of Elders was willing, you'd stone those gay people. And nowadays in Tel Aviv, it's often called the gay capital of the world.
Guy Windsor
So yes, things have improved in certain ways. Where actually are you in Israel?
Jonathan Bluestein
Live in Ramat Gan, which is a suburb of Tel Aviv. It's not that far away. It's worth mentioning, by the way, it's almost surreal having this casual, lovely, friendly talk? And we're in the midst of a war here, literally.
Guy Windsor
Yes, I’m aware of this.
Jonathan Bluestein
The sirens sound off several times a day, and then we have to go down to the shelter. So ordinarily, a person of my age would have been Military Reserve, because I did serve. Unfortunately, when my service was finished, I requested to be in reserve. Typically you don't even have to request, it's automatic. But since I was with the Israeli police force, they did not have the bureaucratic arrangement for people with my type of duties to be in reserve. So I was absolved. So instead, I simply volunteer to treat people with traditional Chinese medicine as best I can to try to help, especially civilians who just fled from southern Israel.
Guy Windsor
Wow. Okay. Yeah, difficult times.
Jonathan Bluestein
It's difficult. But you know what, despite the great tragedy that is being experienced, collectively, right now, in the region. Often, there is nothing quite like a war to unite the people, which is something that the British have not experienced, fortunately, since the Second World War, but we Israelis have had several times over within the span of the past 75 years. And the nation is now socially speaking, more united than ever. So this is a dynamic of war that they think is not actually discussed so much in the historical research on the wars of the past. People focus on the military campaigns, the weapons, the strategy, the politics, but what we often don't see written about are, how did the common people behave?
Guy Windsor
It's becoming a lot more common. There's a lot more of that in the last 30, 40 years of historical research. And not least, the usual effect of bombing a city is to unite the city against the bombers. And they knew this already, quite soon after the Second World War, and yet still what the Americans did in Vietnam, and did it help? No, it didn't. It's one of those things. Everybody knows that bombing civilians doesn't work militarily, and yet they still do it, because I guess they feel they have to be seen to be doing something.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yeah. I mean, it depends on one's goal, the goal can be to eradicate the enemy, the goal might be to make more money for the military industrial complex. The goal might be to psychologically undermine the enemy to the point of less retaliation in the future.
Guy Windsor
That really doesn't work.
Jonathan Bluestein
Well, you know what. Does it work in the short term, long term? Here in the Middle East, what we've seen is following military campaigns, there typically has been quiet on the military front, but it just did not last. The more severe the campaign, the longer it has lasted. Just for example, we haven't had much action on the northern front since the second Lebanese war. You know, they shoot a missile here and there but overall, rather quiet. We haven't had any attacks coming from Egypt since the Yom Kippur War, the October War of 1973. Now of course, we also signed a peace deal with them. But if politically speaking in Egypt, I think the vibe, the kind of attitude towards Israel in Egypt is overwhelmingly negative in the majority of the population. And so it is a sort of a cold peace. There are a lot of tourists coming from Israel to visit Egypt, you know that the Egyptians would be well behaved in that in that regard. Egyptians are coming to Israel, especially to Jerusalem for worship for religious reasons. And we are well behaved towards them. There are a lot of tensions, but the war has sort of brought things to at least a temporary standstill. So I think it depends on whom your enemy is, the magnitude of destruction, we see the Japanese are arming themselves now, now they have a military once more. But they have been quiet and pacifistic for several decades. Also the Americans, it's I think with the Americans is very different things with the invasions of, say Vietnam and Japan. In Japan, there was a whole takeover of the entire Japanese educational system. And so the Japanese were, we could say convinced, but actually educationally coerced to think differently about their recent and future histories. In Vietnam, I don't think that the United States had had done anything like this. And the results were very different. So I think there are more factors, civilian and cultural factors beyond just the bombings themselves.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I mean, these are extremely complex phenomena. But actually, there are a couple of questions that I ask most of my guests. Let us get to those. The first is, what is the best idea you haven't acted on?
Jonathan Bluestein
Well, when I was young, my parents attempted to have me study all manner of musical instruments. And the one that they actually desired as a child was a piano. And I found myself almost tapping my fingers against the table as if I'm was playing piano throughout my childhood. So there's something in there and I do have a musical ear. But they haven't quite picked an instrument, and certainly not the piano throughout my life. And then I got into martial arts. Now, I'm so deeply occupied with the martial arts and writing books and Chinese medicine nowadays, that I really do not have time to pick up an instrument. I’m engaged with too many other things. So I think I have some time.
Guy Windsor
You have kids?
Jonathan Bluestein
I do know not. What you've heard earlier is our elderly cats, Ginger, whom we say that she's 17. A little bit senile, so she miaows too much.
Guy Windsor
So you don’t actually have human children?
Jonathan Bluestein
No, not yet.
Guy Windsor
Because I was thinking, because my mum's a piano teacher. And so she insisted, actually, she bought one of those electric pianos actually has the proper pedals. And it actually has the right kind of piano feel, doesn't take up a lot of space. But it's a great thing to have if you have a kid in the house, because they can learn to pick out tunes and what have you. And my younger daughter, she doesn't like having formal piano lessons. But she plays Taylor Swift stuff, she kind of works it out herself on the piano, because she's a massive Taylor Swift fan. So she works it all out herself on the piano, and just having the piano there creates the opportunity to play it. So I think if you put a piano in your house somewhere, you might actually find yourself, five minutes here, 10 minutes there, when you need to maybe need to let your subconscious work out the structure for the next book, just play Für Elise or whatever.
Jonathan Bluestein
Could be. Once this war is over, we'll have more time to think about such things. You know, in every person's life, there are certain points of divergency where you see that your life could have led you someplace very different. For example, I studied law and my father had a medium-sized law office, which was very successful. He later merged it with one of the biggest law firms in the country. I could have gone on to be a very successful lawyer. I do have the skills for it. But that's not what my soul was calling upon me to do.
Guy Windsor
What kid grows up thinking, I could be a martial artist or a lawyer. I know I'll be a lawyer.
Jonathan Bluestein
Well, I was thinking I would be a lawyer since I was four years old and told everybody I knew. Then I changed my mind around the age of 21, 22.
Guy Windsor
Okay, fair enough.
Jonathan Bluestein
There was also one moment when I was travelling, I was just on the plane on my way to my first trip in China to practice martial arts. And I was sitting in business class. My father had lots of points with the airlines. So used the points to buy me a business class ticket to spoil me on my first trip to China. Very kind of him. And next to me was sitting this fellow who was formerly an Air Force pilot in Israel, and was telling me these stories, and we really, really hit off and we liked each other. And by the end of the flight, he was trying to convince me to come to Beijing, and perhaps see if I would like to work for his company. And some thing about that conversation made it seem to me, and remember, I was a police investigator, interrogator that this fellow might have been with, you know, a certain agency. And he actually gave me his card, and I was supposed to call, and I was looking at this card every day and thinking, oh, my God, this doesn't happen every day. It’s a big opportunity. And Beijing is just a three hour drive from Tianjin where I was practicing martial arts. But, then I thought hey, I'm here in China to practice martial arts to become a martial arts teacher. I'm not going to go into this James Bond kind of adventure or whatever that is. It's not what I signed up for so I had to throw away the card. So I wouldn’t keep thinking about it.
Guy Windsor
Okay. My last question. Somebody gives you like a million dollars or whatever a huge amount of money to improve historical martial arts or in your case perhaps, Chinese martial arts worldwide. How would you spend the money?
Jonathan Bluestein
Temple. Easy. A temple, but not like a temple on a mountaintop, which by the way, I've been to in China. I've been to places like this, magnificent. No, a big school. Which is what I'm going to set up anyway, in the years to come. A school, which is martial arts school with a Chinese medicine clinic, that's the ultimate goal. I got into Chinese medicine to complement the martial side of what I practice, what I teach. Traditional Chinese Medicine is the yin to the yang of traditional Chinese martial arts. They have a lot in common and they work well together. And historically, many great teachers had school martial arts schools, which are also Chinese medicine clinics. So that's what made me interested.
Guy Windsor
You may be interested to know, I owe my swordsmanship career to traditional Chinese medicine, because I had hideous tendonitis in both wrists. To the point that, I was a cabinetmaker at the time, that if I did any swordsmanship, when you banged swords together, my wrists would swell up, and I’d have difficulty working. And doctors just basically told me well, stop swinging swords around, like, that's a solution. And so I met this kung fu instructor by chance, and happened to mention this. And he did this massage, which was unbelievably painful. And he taught me some basic exercises. And so long as I keep up my massage and exercise, my wrists are absolutely fine. And they are way better than they ever were before the problem occurred. And, I mean, literally, it went from maybe I could do swords once a week if I'm really careful, to I could do swords as much as I like. So I am a huge fan of Chinese medicine at least for some things.
Jonathan Bluestein
Basically you do it primarily with Chinese medical massage, right?
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And I still get this herbal medicine stuff that you splash on and massage in.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yeah, that's cool. Dit Da Jao translates as healthful medicine or healthful wine. And these are herbal formulas that are made as alcoholic tinctures that you rub into your skin in affected areas. It can be for all kinds of conditions, but usually for orthopaedic conditions.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that's exactly what we use it for.
Jonathan Bluestein
Yeah, that's really excellent.
Guy Windsor
So you're going to use this millions of dollars to build your temple? Where would you put it?
Jonathan Bluestein
I just nicknamed it a temple.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Your school, your martial arts centre?
Jonathan Bluestein
I would put it in probably my city somewhere close to where I live. There are two modes of thought with the Chinese monk tradition. So a lot of monks dwell in the monasteries for the specific reason that in a monastery you have a lifestyle that allows you a lot of time to practice your religion, your meditation, everything else you want to work for, whether it's martial arts or other things. But there are actually monastic traditions that say the highest level of being a monk is living as a monk amongst the people. A life that externally appears perfectly ordinary, but within your home and within your own little temple that you build wherever you have this very deep religious existence, but you still live among the people and you fulfil your role, both as a monk and as a human being, a part of civilization, a society. So at this stage in my life, I feel actually more comfortable living amongst the people and I don't have any desires to retreat into the mountains or anything like that.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, fair enough. Well, good. I'm not a fan of martial arts schools that hide away where you can't find them. So we are well over time. So let's wrap it up. I'll cut this little bit out. So thanks so much for joining me today Jonathan. It's been lovely to meet you.
Jonathan Bluestein
Thank you so very much Guy for having me and hosting me. I think we had a splendid, very educational conversation for the both of us.
